Camera traps from inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone reveal how the occupation of Russian forces at the site in February and March 2022 altered the behavior of wildlife living in the area.

After the invasion, which involved significant armed conflict inside the exclusion zone, mammals like deer and horses became less active and spent less time moving around at night, a new study reports.

Researchers discovered the changes by comparing footage from camera traps collected during the early months of Russia's 2022 invasion with recordings from the same period a year earlier, before the conflict began. The findings, published Thursday (June 18) in the journal Science, offer a rare glimpse of how animals respond to the immediate disruption caused by warfare.

"I wish the opportunity to analyze how the unfolding invasion affected wildlife ha[d] never happened," Svitlana Kudrenko, who conducted the study as part of her PhD at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in Germany, told Live Science in an email. "Unlike in preindustrial times, current interstate conflicts are highly detrimental for wildlife because of a long list of warfare, often operated remotely."

The study took place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a roughly 1,000-square-mile (2,600 square kilometers) area surrounding the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Following the reactor explosion, authorities evacuated the region and restricted most human activity. Over the decades, with little to no human activity, wildlife populations have flourished, turning the zone into a natural laboratory for scientists studying ecosystem recovery and animal behavior.

But in February 2022, Russian forces seized control of the region during the beginning stages of the invasion of Ukraine. Military vehicles, troop movements, weapons being fired and other wartime disturbances suddenly transformed one of Europe's most unusual wildlife refuges into an active war zone.

To investigate the impact, researchers analyzed data from camera traps already operating in the exclusion zone from 2020 to 2022. Studying the ecological effects of armed conflict is difficult because war zones are dangerous and often hard for researchers to access.

By using the existing network of automated cameras, the scientists captured wildlife responses that would have been impossible to record otherwise. In total, the team analyzed almost 2,000 photographs and videos from the exclusion zone to build a picture of behavioral changes in response to the conflict.

The images and footage revealed responses from 11 wild mammal species, ‪showing that some animals changed their behavior during periods of heavier fighting.

Several mammal species — including roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), red deer (Cervus elaphus), moose (Alces alces) and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) — were less active during the occupation than before the conflict, especially at night, the team reported.

The findings suggest that the impact of conflict can ripple through entire ecosystems. While Russia no longer occupies the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the authors highlighted that this study still shows how animal behavior can adapt to warfare.

Camera traps could become a valuable tool for measuring the environmental costs of conflict and understanding how wildlife copes with sudden human disturbances across the globe, the researchers added.

"Our study highlights the need to develop and implement research and conservation strategies focusing on armed conflict impacts on wildlife and environment in general, especially in areas of conservation importance," Kudrenko said.

What do you know about the animal kingdom? Test your knowledge with our animal quiz!

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant and its surrounding area are showing increased radiation levels after heavy fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops in the region, Ukrainian officials said Friday (Feb. 25).

Online data from the Chernobyl exclusion zone’s automated radiation-monitoring system shows that gamma radiation has increased twenty times above usual levels at multiple observation points, which officials from the Ukrainian nuclear agency attributed to radioactive dust thrown up by the movement of heavy military equipment in the area.   

The defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been under occupation by attacking Russian soldiers since Thursday (Feb. 24) after Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the early hours of the morning. Workers at the facility, stationed there to monitor and maintain radiation levels within safe bounds, have been taken hostage by Russian troops, according to Anna Kovalenko, a Ukrainian military expert.

Related: 5 weird things you didn't know about Chernobyl

"The station staff is being held hostage. This threatens the security of not only Ukraine but also a significant part of Europe," Kovalenko wrote on Facebook.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a news briefing on Thursday (Feb. 24) that the Biden administration was "outraged" by reports of Russian troops holding Chernobyl plant staff against their will and demanded their release. She warned that the action "could upend the routine civil service efforts required to maintain and protect the nuclear waste facilities."

As one of the most radioactive places in the world, large parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone have been closed off since the disastrous meltdown of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. In that year, two explosions inside the plant’s reactor flipped its 2,000-ton (1,800 metric tons) lid like a coin, blanketing the surrounding 1,000-square-mile (2,600 square kilometers) with radioactive dust and reactor chunks. Following evacuation and the dousing of the nuclear fire — which cost many firefighters their lives — the reactor was sealed off and the area deemed uninhabitable by humans for the next 24,000 years. 

Heavy fighting around the plant on Thursday (Feb. 24) led to concerns that stray munitions could accidentally pierce the exploded reactor’s two layers of protection — consisting of a new, outer safe-confinement structure and an inner concrete sarcophagus — and release the deadly radioactive fallout trapped inside.  

In a contradictory statement, Igor Konashenkov, the spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said that radiation around the plant was within normal levels and that Russian forces were working with the facilities’ staff to ensure the area’s safety.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, believes that the Chernobyl site was seized as part of a "possible blackmail" tactic against the West.

"Chernobyl has been seized and I think they will blackmail the West. The President’s Office is preparing a response to possible blackmail through Chernobyl," Arestovych said in a statement.

The site, which is just 60 miles (97 km) north of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, lies on a direct invasion route between Kyiv and the Russian forces’ northern entry point to Ukraine at the Belarusian border. 

Claire Corkhill, a professor of nuclear material degradation at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., wrote on Twitter that the gamma radiation around the Chernoybl plant "looks to have increased by around 20 times compared with a few days ago." However, caution should be taken "not to over-interpret at this stage," she said.

"This appears to be based on a single data point," Corkhill added in a separate tweet. "What is intriguing is that the level of radiation has increased mostly around the main routes in and out of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, as well as the reactor. This would tend to suggest that increased movement of people or vehicles may have disturbed radioactive dust."

The highly radioactive fuel inside the Chernobyl reactor is buried deep beneath the defunct plant and is unlikely to be released unless the reactor is directly targeted, Corkhill said.

Fighting around the plant was just a small part of a much wider ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the biggest on a European nation since World War II. As Russian forces close in on Kyiv, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense wrote on its Twitter page, urging citizens to stay at home, inform the Ukrainian military about the movements of Russian military equipment, and make Molotov cocktails in preparation for urban warfare.

Originally published on Live Science.

Radiation exposure from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster — the world's deadliest nuclear accident — raised the risk of certain mutations linked to thyroid cancer, but it didn't cause new mutations in DNA that parents who cleaned up after the nuclear accident passed along to their children, two new studies find. 

The new research is a step forward in understanding the mechanisms that drive human thyroid cancer, said Stephen Chanock, the director of the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the senior author on both research papers. It's also reassuring for those exposed to radiation in events such as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster and who plan to start families, Chanock told Live Science. 

"People who had very high-dose radiation didn't have more mutations in the next generation," he said. "That's telling us that if there's any effect it's very, very subtle and very rare." 

Related: See images of Chernobyl, frozen in time 

Chernobyl fallout

The nuclear accident at Chernobyl that occured on April 26, 1986, exposed residents of Ukraine, Belarus and the nearby Russian Federation to a cloud of radioactive contamination. Epidemiological research has shown that those exposed had a higher risk than the unexposed for a particular kind of thyroid cancer called papillary thyroid carcinoma. (Fortunately, this type of cancer is treatable and has a high survival rate, according to the American Thyroid Association.) The younger the person is at time of radiation exposure, the higher the risk of developing papillary thyroid carcinoma in the future. 

In the new study, Chanock and his colleagues analyzed tissue from the thyroid carcinoma tumors held in the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, comparing the genetics of tumors from 359 people who were exposed to Chernobyl radiation before adulthood with that of tumors from people from the same region who were born more than nine months after the Chernobyl accident and thus not directly exposed. Radiation exposure in these individuals was well-studied, so researchers could determine not only if a person had radiation exposure, but how much. 

The researchers found that with more radiation exposure, tumor tissue showed higher levels of double-stranded DNA breaks, in which the two strands that make up DNA snap at the same point. Cells have repair mechanisms to fix such breaks, but the findings showed that the tumors had errors in these repair mechanisms, too, particularly one called non-homologous end-joining (NEHJ).

"They have just one major error that drives the cancer," Chanock said, adding that this was the first time that researchers have been able to identify such a driver in a human cancer. 

These errors aren't unique to radiation-caused cancers, Chanock said. The same mutations occurred in non-exposed people with tumors, just at a lower rate. They also occur in other types of cancer along with additional mutations, Chanock said. For that reason, he is hopeful that the results could lead to new drug studies that target these genes and the cellular processes they direct. 

The next generation 

In a second study, researchers looked for possible multigenerational effects of radiation exposure. Previous studies on atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not found evidence of major congenital defects, stillbirth or newborn deaths in babies conceived after the exposure, though a recent re-analysis of the data suggests the possibility of increased risk. 

The current study focused on living children of a group known as the liquidators —— people who worked at the plant to clean up the radioactive mess in the months after the disaster. Researchers sequenced the entire genomes of 130 children born between 1987 and 2002 to these individuals, who were exposed to very high radiation levels.

The research team was looking for de novo mutations, or totally new genetic mutations found in the child's DNA that were not in either parents' genome. Finding an increase in genetic mutations found in the child but not the parents would suggest that radiation was damaging the sperm or the egg. Finding no increase in de novo mutations would suggest that children largely escape damage to their DNA from their parents' exposure.

Between 50 and 100 of these mutations occur naturally in each generation, and the results showed that the mutations occurred at a similar rate in children of Chernobyl liquidators. There was no effect of radiation. 

"This is extraordinary work," said Daniel Stram, a professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the research. "It's really bringing together the genetic side and the radiation epidemiology side." 

There are long-standing concerns that radiation exposure from work or from cancer therapies might affect future children, but the new research is reassuring, Stram told Live Science. 

"People have talked about doing this kind of work for decades," he said. "It's only now that we have the technology to be able to actually address the questions."

The two papers are published today (April 22) in the journal Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

WASHINGTON — When 10 people in New York City developed a very rare form of eye cancer over just a four-year period, doctors were puzzled. The cancer, called vitreoretinal lymphoma, had been diagnosed in the U.S. only a handful of times over the previous 20 years. 

The doctors tried to figure out what might have caused this rare cancer in these 10 patients, all of whom were diagnosed between 2010 and 2013, and they discovered that six of the patients had an interesting connection: They all had lived near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The Chernobyl disaster is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history: On April 26, 1986, an explosion occurred at the plant in Ukraine, leaking massive amounts of cancer-causing radiation into the atmosphere. [Cancer-Fighting Diet: 6 Tips to Reduce Your Risk]

Vitreoretinal lymphoma is a type of eye cancer that affects white blood cells in the retina, the optic nerve or the vitreous humor (the gel-like substance found inside the eye), said Roxana Moslehi, a genetic epidemiologist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and the senior author of the study on the New York cases. The doctors who diagnosed the cancers had reached out to Moslehi when they realized they were seeing something strange happening with the rates of this cancer, she said.

Moslehi set out to determine if the cases of vitreoretinal cancer represented a "cluster" — in other words, a group of cases that are close together in time and location and occur at higher rates than expected. She presented her findings here today (April 2) at the American Association for Cancer Research's annual meeting. The findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Based on data from the New York State Cancer Registry, Moslehi found that statistically, there should be only one case of vitreoretinal lymphoma in New York state in a four-year period. So to find 10 cases in New York City alone in that same time period was certainly "unanticipated," and represented a cluster, she said. Moslehi also looked at national rates of the disease, and also found incredibly low rates.

To figure out what could be causing this cluster, the researchers looked for commonalities among the patients, Moslehi said. They noted that eight of the 10 were of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, she said.

But even more interesting to the researchers was that six of the 10 patients had lived near Chernobyl at the time of the disaster, Moslehi said. Four of the patients had lived in Ukraine, one patient had lived in Poland and one patient had lived in Moldova, according to the case report.

"It was very surprising to discover this," Moslehi told Live Science. The cause of vitreoretinal lymphoma is unknown, "so any clues that you get as to possible causes make you very excited," she said. [10 Do's and Don'ts to Reduce Your Risk of Cancer]

Indeed, in looking through the literature, the researchers found several studies linking other types of lymphoma to exposure to radiation, Moslehi said. For example, clean-up workers at Chernobyl have been shown to have higher rates of a type of cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia, she said. In addition, rates of leukemia in children and adults are increased in people who were exposed to either Chernobyl or the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Japan during World War II, she said. (Both leukemia and lymphoma affect white blood cells.)

The New York City patients who had lived near Chernobyl ranged in age from 62 to 85 at the time of their diagnosis, according to the case report. The diagnoses took place between 24 and 27 years after the nuclear disaster, meaning that a number of the patients were in their late 30s when the disaster took place. Moslehi is still looking at the cases in the other four patients, who did not live near Chernobyl, for clues in those cases, she said.

There was also another cluster of cases that involved related conditions, called myeloproliferative disorders, that was found in Israel, Moslehi said. Myeloproliferative disorders cause blood cells proliferative abnormally. Similar to the group in New York City, the patients in Israel were of Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity and lived near Chernobyl at the time of the disaster.

Moslehi noted that they "still cannot link this disease or lymphoma to radiation per se" — more studies are needed to fully understand the cause. For example, it may be that Ashkenazi Jews are more susceptible to the effects of radiation, she said.

Editor's note: This story was corrected from the original version. The Israeli cluster had myeloproliferative disorders, not vitreoretinal lymphoma.

Originally published on Live Science.

A massive 32,000-ton, stainless steel arch — so large it could conceal the Statue of Liberty — is being constructed to cover what's left of a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl that exploded in 1986, which triggered a massive radiation leak that has been described as the world's worst nuclear accident to date.

The sarcophagus-type structure, which is scheduled to be ready by 2017, is designed to trap any radioactive dust that may escape into the atmosphere from the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, reported The New York Times. The enormous cap will also enable workers to complete cleanup operations in the area, which includes safely moving radioactive debris into permanent storage facilities.

"It's an amazing structure," said Nicolas Caille, project director for Novarka, the French company in charge of building the arch, according to the New York Times. "You can't compare it to anything else."

The steel covering is designed to stand for 100 years, and is expected to cost roughly $1.5 billion — a sum that is being financed, in part, by the United States and some 30 other nations, according to The New York Times.

The explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant occurred in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986. Emergency crews battled fires and radiation leaks in the aftermath of the explosion, and residents of the nearby city of Pripyat were evacuated. A total of 31 people died from radiation exposure within three months of the accident, and more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer may be linked to the fallout, though direct connections may be impossible to prove.

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

The explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is among the worst nuclear accidents the world has ever witnessed.

Where is Chernobyl?

Chernobyl is located north of Kiev, Ukraine, near the border with Belarus. The nuclear plant was close to the newly built city of Pripyat, the small town of Chornobyl and was surrounded primarily by farms and woodland.

The Chernobyl plant

Chernobyl used four Soviet-designed RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors, a design that's now recognized as inherently flawed. This system uses enriched U-235 uranium fuel to heat water, creating steam that drives the reactors' turbines and generates electricity. The nuclear core in the RBMK-1000 actually became more reactive as it produced steam, creating a positive-feedback loop known as a "positive-void coefficient."

What happened at Chernobyl?

Plant operators were preparing for routine maintenance on reactor number 4 on April 25, 1986, and, against safety regulations, disabled the automatic shutdown mechanisms and other plant equipment. The incident began at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, when hot nuclear fuel rods were lowered into cooling water, releasing an immense amount of steam and creating more reactivity because of the RBMK reactor's design flaws. This started a series of explosions and fires that damaged reactors number three and four.

The official reaction

While Soviet authorities were slow to release details of the incident, the nearest city of Pripyat was evacuated about 36 hours after the accident. Many residents were already exhibiting symptoms of radiation sickness.

Soviet authorities come clean

The prevailing winds at the time of the accident were from the south and east, so much of the radiation traveled northwest toward Belarus. When radiation alarms began to go off at a nuclear plant in Sweden, Soviet authorities were forced to reveal the full extent of the crisis.

An imminent return

Residents were told they would be returning in a few days, so many left valuables and personal belongings behind.

Modern-day ruins

Abandoned ruins are all that remains from the once bustling cities around Chernobyl. Within three months of the accident, 31 people died from radiation exposure or other direct effects of the disaster, according to the NRC, UNSCEAR and other sources. More than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer may eventually be linked to radiation exposure, but the precise number of illnesses related to the Chernobyl accident is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain.

Long-lasting effects

The forests around Chernobyl are still heavily contaminated with radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

A ghost town

Hotel Polesie in Pripyat stands empty as if awaiting the return of staff and guests. The overall rate of cancer deaths and other health effects related to Chernobyl's radiation is lower than what was initially feared.

The emergency reponse

The damaged reactor was hastily sealed in a concrete sarcophagus, but the effectiveness of this is the subject of intense scientifi debate. The plant itself continuted in operation for several years, and was finally shut down entirely in December 2000. The plant, the ghost towns of Pripyat and Chornobyl, and a large area surronding the plant now known as the "zone of alientation" are largely off-limits to humans.

Chernobyl today

Because of the long-lived radiation in the region surrounding the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the area won't be safe for human habitation for at least 20,000 years.

Almost 30 years ago, the world's attention was fixed on Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant in Ukraine that exploded in one of the world's worst nuclear disasters.

The world has moved on since that 1986 catastrophe, but at Chernobyl, one thing hasn't changed very much: The dead trees, plants and leaves at the contaminated site don't decay at nearly the same rate as plants elsewhere, researchers have found.

"We were stepping over all these dead trees on the ground that had been killed by the initial blast," Tim Mousseau, a professor of biology at the University of South Carolina, said in a statement. "Years later, these tree trunks were in pretty good shape. If a tree had fallen in my backyard, it would be sawdust in 10 years or so." [Images: Chernobyl, Frozen in Time]

Mousseau and Anders Møller of the Université Paris-Sud have made ongoing investigations into the biology of radioactive areas like Chernobyl and Fukushima, Japan.

Much of their work has taken them into the Red Forest, the infamous wooded region surrounding Chernobyl where the trees turned an ominous reddish-brown color before dying. The pair noticed that the tree trunks seemed largely unchanged, even after a few decades.

"Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed when we first encountered them," Mousseau, who is also co-director of the Chernobyl and Fukushima Research Initiatives at the University of South Carolina, told Smithsonian.

To find out what was happening — or, more accurately, what wasn't happening — the research team collected hundreds of samples of leaf litter from forest floors that were not contaminated by radiation and stuffed the leaves into bags lined with panty hose (to keep out insects). They then distributed these bags around the Chernobyl area and waited nine months.

The results were striking: Samples of leaf litter that were placed in highly contaminated areas showed 40 percent less decomposition than samples that were placed in uncontaminated sites. The degree of decay was proportional to the degree of radioactive contamination at each site, according to the study, published in the journal Oecologia.

Radiation is known to have harmful effects on microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. Recent research has found that radiation therapy can cause severe complications in cancer patients by reducing the populations of helpful bacteria in the intestines. [Infographic: How Radiation Affects the Human Body]

Mousseau and other researchers are concerned that the buildup of leaf litter on the forest floor presents a real danger. "There is growing concern that there could be a catastrophic fire in the coming years," Mousseau said.

In the event of a forest fire, 28 years' worth of undecayed leaves would provide an ideal fuel for the fire, which could then spread radiation throughout the region. "That would end up moving radiocesium and other contaminants via smoke into populated areas," Mousseau said.

"This litter accumulation that we measured, which is likely a direct consequence of reduced microbial decomposing activity, is like kindling," Mousseau added. "It's dry, light and burns quite readily. It adds to the fuel, as well as makes it more likely that catastrophically sized forest fires might start."

Follow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

The United States has approved construction of new nuclear reactors for the first time in three decades. The two new reactors approved today (Feb. 9) for Georgia would represent the first U.S. versions of next-generation reactor designs that have begun appearing in China.

These "third-generation" reactors are said to be safer, with longer-lasting batteries and passive cooling systems powered by gravity so that they can survive longer during emergencies without outside power.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved construction of the two reactors at an existing nuclear power plant in Vogtle, Ga., in a 4-1 vote.

"The last plant that got to this stage of the [approval] process did so in 1978," said Harold McFarlane, manager of the nuclear science and technology directorate at Idaho National Laboratory. "We think it's a very significant step going forward. It is the first of the new generation."

The U.S. froze construction of nuclear power plants after the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island, Pa., in 1979. Consequently, the 104 nuclear plants still operating in the country have designs dating to the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, the first of the third-generation plants were designed in the 1990s and were updated throughout the new millennium.

Making a safer reactor

Following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that led to the meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Plant last March, Germany, Switzerland and Spain halted construction of any new nuclear power plants. However, energy-hungry China has pressed ahead with adding new, third-generation nuclear reactors.

The newly approved AP1000 reactors for the Vogtle plant — to be made by Westinghouse — have safety features that would give people "days instead of hours" to restore electric power in a Fukushima scenario, McFarlane told InnovationNewsDaily. The Fukushima reactors suffered a meltdown after the lack of electricity knocked out their cooling systems.

In the new models, which Westinghouse already has built for China, "the water needed to cool the reactors is stored inside the containment building rather than outside of containment," explained Robert Buell, a risk analyst at Idaho National Laboratory. "You use physics and natural circulation along the containment walls to cool the reactors instead of relying on mechanical systems."

Ghosts of Fukushima

The Fukushima disaster did not go unmentioned during the Nuclear Regulatory Commission vote. According to the news service Reuters, NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko cast the lone vote against the new reactors, arguing that the commission should delay approval until it requires all nuclear plant operators to include "Fukushima enhancements" — safety and operational lessons learned from the meltdown.

Mitchell Singer, a spokesman for the trade group the Nuclear Energy Institute, contended that delaying approval for that reason would be pointless. All reactors, old or new, would have to abide by such regulations anyway once the NRC decided to put the safety standards into effect, Singer argued.

Most proposed nuclear reactors under consideration in the U.S. would be built at current plants. The NRC is reviewing 12 combined license applications for reactors at 20 nuclear power plants; Singer said he expects five new reactors to have powered up by the end of the decade.

Boosting energy production

Nuclear plants in the U.S. have boosted production by 40 percent over the past two decades to make up for the lack of new construction amid the growing demand for electricity. Almost all the 104 reactors are undergoing relicensing and power upgrades to operate for 20 more years, McFarlane said. That's likely to keep nuclear power supplying about a fifth of all US energy needs in the foreseeable future, he said.

Adding a nuclear plant typically has taken five to 10 years. But while building in China, the Shaw/Westinghouse Consortium perfected a modular construction method that shortens that timeline to about four or five years.

The leaner, simpler design also requires fewer construction materials.

"The total amount of commodities in each nuclear plant per megawatt [of energy generated] is reduced substantially, like a 40 percent reduction," McFarlane said.

This story was provided by InnovationNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. You can follow InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @ScienceHsu. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.